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Flappers were a group of young women we associate very much with the 1920s. They were young women who tasted independence during the war, who wanted to earn their own living, who didn't want to define themselves through marriage and motherhood, and who embraced the twenties' spirit of pleasure, independence, exploration, and freedom.
At the beginning of the war, there was a reluctance to allow women to do anything other than nurse, volunteer, or drive ambulances. This not only meant they were out of the home and working, but they also had their own money in their pockets. After the war, many of those women did not want to go back into the home. I think there was a kind of upheaval of the old social proprieties that meant women felt the need to explore who they were. They’d been given the vote; many of them had been granted the right to earn their own property, and they wanted to explore what life held for them.
Skirts were beginning to rise just above the ankle before the war, but during the twenties, I think women saw the most radical change in fashion they had ever seen in history. By the mid-twenties, skirts were rising pretty much to knee-length. Women were wearing trousers, some of them; they were wearing short sleeves; they were going out without gloves and hats even. I mean, this was an extraordinary change from the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
To define freedom in terms of dress can sound superficial, but if you imagine what it must have been like for those women to feel the sun and the wind on their arms and legs, to have short hair, to just be able to move freely, it's an amazing liberating power that fashion had. There was one American feminist, very interestingly, who wrote very soon after war was declared that the door of the doll's house had opened. Certainly, for all the ups and downs of the women's liberation movement, I think that war had a huge effect on bringing women out of the 19th century and into the modern age.